A Journey Through 'The Waste Land'

The Guardian's Jonathan McAloon reflects on the personal dimensions of T.S. Eliot's seminal work, "The Waste Land," while looking into a recent exhibition of works inspired by the poem, currently showing at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. McAloon opens the article by considering Eliot's frayed mental state at the time of the poem's initial composition: "In 1921, having taken time off from his job at Lloyds Bank for what would now be called depression, TS Eliot spent three weeks convalescing in Margate. It was the hottest October in years. Every day, he got the tram from the Albemarle Hotel in Cliftonville to the sea front, and, sitting in Nayland Rock shelter, he wrote 'some 50 lines' of his poem The Waste Land." We'll pick up with mention of the Turner exhibition and more about Eliot's life:

Journeys with The Waste Land, an exhibition at Turner Contemporary in Margate, is currently displaying artworks in sync with Eliot’s poem. Contemporaneous Paul Nash paintings show the barbed wire of no man’s land, alongside Graham Sutherland’s response to Eliot’s line: “And the dead tree gives no shelter.” A Henry Moore drawing of stooped Londoners in a war shelter evokes something of what Eliot would have seen in his time in the “Unreal City”, attempting to make his way in literary London and finding it populated by men either unfit for service or physically deformed by it.

Yet the crisis at the heart of The Waste Land wasn’t only global, it was also personal. Eliot’s wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, also had poor physical and mental health and he scattered his poem with references to their life together. “I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter,” ends the poem’s first stanza, in one of the most powerful and subtle lines ever written about insomnia, of which he and Vivienne were both sufferers. She asked him to remove some lines due to their being too personal, but many others about a husband and wife living with mental illness were retained. “My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me./ Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.” Theirs was one of the worst romantic mismatches in modern letters.

Head to The Guardian for further insights and anecdotes surrounding this masterpiece.